Holocaust

In this powerful documentary, Maya Angelou reveals the story of a brave group of people who fought Hitler with the only weapons they had: charcoal, pencil stubs, shreds of paper, and memories etched in their minds. These artists took their fate into their own hands to make a compelling statement about the human spirit, enduring against unimaginable odds.

A daring hybrid of realism and fantasy, Forgiveness is a psychological thriller that explores the tragedies of the Middle East. David, a young American-Israeli, returns to Israel to join the army, only to find himself in a catatonic state after accidentally shooting a Palestinian girl while on patrol. He is committed to a mental institution which sits on the ruins of a Palestinian village. The head psychiatrist tries to cure him with medication, while another patient in the hospital, a Holocaust survivor, tries to redeem him by opening his heart to the ghost that haunts him. He returns to New York under his father's care, believing that his horrific past is behind him…until his love for a Palestinian woman brings his trauma back to the surface.

In picturesque Montmarte, three children wearing a yellow star play in the streets, oblivious to the darkness spreading over Nazi-occupied France. Their parents do not seem too concerned either, somehow putting their trust in the Vichy Government. But beyond this view, storm clouds are gathering. Hitler demands that the French government round up its Jews and put them on trains for the extermination camps in the East. And sooon the collaborators start to put the plan into effect, and within a short time, thirteen thousand of Paris’s Jews--among them four thousand children--will be rounded up and sent on a road with no return. As the Nazis feed the children deceptions, two brave children and a nurse struggle to uncover the truth and escape from the terror.

Two Israeli car dealers, Shmuel and Siso, invest five thousand American dollars into a vintage 1985 Lincoln Continental Limousine that they plan to sell in Germany for fifty grand. But when they take it there, they run into problems with the customs police, who are suspicious of Middle Easterners with a huge American gas guzzler. The routine search causes Shmuel to experience a disturbing hallucination about WWII Germany and the Nazis his parents fled from some sixty years earlier. And their adventure in Germany turns into a struggle just to make it out safely, as the echoes of the past catch up with them.

As the trial of the Nazi war criminal Klaus Barbie plays on television in the background, a Frenchman named Victor (Hippolyte Girardot) combs through documents, hoping to uncover the truth about his family’s past. This draws him into an astonishing journey into the psyche of three generations of a Catholic French family after discovering their parents and grandparents were victims of the Holocaust. Amos Gitai's films introduce a new generation and their questions and judgements of the Holocaust and the part that the host societies and the surviving generations, both Jewish and Gentile, owe to the remembrance for the sufferers and for future generations to try to understand.

When Morris, a fellow survivor of the Nazi concentration camps, comes to visit Menachem in Israel in 1962, Menachem is glad to see him, and intrigued by his tales about nearly limitless prosperity and opportunity in Canada. He is deeply worried about the future of his family in war-ridden Israel--should he relocate his family to Toronto? Menachem's ten-year-old son Haim is far too busy playing games and planning dangerous forays into neighboring countries to notice his father's preoccupations, and his brother-in-law is ferociously dedicated to implementing socialist ideals in a strong Israel and is not about to leave. However, his daughter Miri has been seeing a bad sort of fellow and is in real danger of getting into trouble with him. He sends his daughter to Toronto to get her out of trouble but has second thoughts about leaving Israel for good.

Amidst the terror of a German concentration camp in 1944 Poland, a young Jewish woman and a Polish prisoner fall in love. This impossible passion fuels the prisoner's courage, who manages to rescue his Jewish girlfriend. Against all odds, they escape the camp and survive a treacherous journey to freedom. But during the chaos of the end of the war, they are forcibly separated and each is convinced that the other has died.

More than thirty years later in New York, the happily married 52-year-old woman accidentally gets the most astonishing news of her life: her former Polish lover is still alive. And she has to see him again.

Saviors in the Night (Unter Bauern) is based on the memories of Marga Spiegel. In her narrative, published in 1965, she describes how courageous farmers in southern Münsterland, Germany hid her, her husband Siegfried and their little daughter Karin from 1943 until 1945, saving them from deportation to the extermination camps in the East.

Without reservation, these farmers offer the refugees their protection. That this turns them into heroes would never occur to them. They are used to weathering even dangerous situations somehow, guided only by their instinct and century-old code of ethics. They risk their own lives, and, if necessary, even that of their families. And this is their story.

The film tells this story of survival with a sense for the absurd in daily life and not without the typical Westphalian humor.

By age 14, he had written five novels and penned a diary about the Nazi occupation of Prague. By 16, he had produced 170 drawings and paintings, edited an underground magazine in the Jewish ghetto, and written numerous short stories. But by then, he had also walked to the gas chamber at Auschwitz.

Slight and stoop-shouldered, filled with intellectual curiosity but prone to mischief, Petr Ginz read voraciously, wrote constantly, developed cryptographs to record BBC broadcasts, built exploding toy cannons to frighten his classmates, and drew and painted a world full of adventure and exotic locations. In his novel, an allegory about Hitler, Petr wrote and illustrated the story of a giant robotic creature that is used by the government to terrorize the people. He ends the book with the warning: "Is it not possible that a new monster may appear on the surface of this earth, worse than this one--a monster that...will torture mankind in a terrible manner."

Through Petr's artwork, novels, short stories and magazine articles, interwoven with fantastical animation, this unconventional documentary portrait reveals his journey from precocious child to young adult, from innocence to the painful awareness of inhumanity, from gifted artist and writer to prodigy. Although Petr's life ended at Auschwitz, it is not a story of tragedy but a celebration--a testament to how a boy’s wonder and creative expression represent the best of what makes us human.

Arik, a teenage boy growing up in Haifa in 1968, gets a job working for Yankele Bride, a matchmaker. Yankele, a mysterious Holocaust survivor, has an office in back of a movie theater that shows only love stories, run by a family of seven Romanian dwarves in the seedy area by the port. Yankele introduces Arik to a new world, built on the ruins of an old one. As Arik begins to learn the mysteries of the human heart through his work with Yankele, he falls in love with Tamara, his friend Beni's cousin. Tamara has just returned from America and is full of talk of women's rights, free love and rock and roll. The disparate parts of Arik's life collide in unexpected, often funny and very moving ways as he lives through a summer that changes him forever. Avi Nesher's latest film mixes comedy with drama as it tells a coming-of-age story unlike any you've ever seen before.

A seventy-three year old farmer, Wasserman, swore never to pray again, blaming God for his family's annihilation during the Holocaust. But in serious debt and suffering from the effects of a devastating draught, he needs help. The only way his religious neighbors will come to his aid is if he agrees to join them in the synagogue for a communal prayer. Now Wasserman has to to decide between the wishes of the community, his two daughters and a grandson as well as his financial need, and his conflict with the God who stole his family from him.